Where do you store all your photos?

I own a 1TB external hard disk and lately I've been taking so many pictures that I realized that it would run out some day and I'd prolly need to get another hard disk to store my photos. And I'm only a 3-4months learning photographer, not to mention those professionals who have millions of photos.

I store the keepers on the PC's 2 TB hard disk and I back up that disk once a week or so on a portable 1 TB drive that I put in a drawer at work. The other 1 TB drive is then going home for the next backup action.

After using numerous external drive scenarios, providing multiple copies, my file system became TOO complicated. I've opted for a new Drobo system (4 bay with 4 SATA 2TB drives)! Life is good, again. I was able to move all my image files from 3 smaller drives into this wonder. Once the transfer is done, the Drobo rebuilt the previews and I find this system to give trustworthy protection/storage/ use

I am using Disk station Synology ds211j with 1TB storage capacity. But the question is: Do you really need to store all your photos?

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I agree with the question posed! However, once deleted, that image is gone forever. As I develop my skills, I do check older files as categorized in my Lightroom 3, thankful for the ability to see my progress. The Synology and Drobo systems were my 2 considerations. I opted for the Drobo mostly on the advice of my photo instructor. (All in, B+H delivered Drobo and 4 drives in the range of $350 +/-, depending on drive sizes about 2 months ago.)

I agree with the question posed! However, once deleted, that image is gone forever.

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When I look back to my film days, having 2-5 good shots out of 36 was very good keep ratio. Now in digital era you can take hundreds shots in a minute, but usually only few of them are good to keep. Lightroom is helping much in such case as picture is just marked for deleting until purged, so you can get back to it when needed.

From my point of view good backup solution is a must as I don't want to loose single bit due to disk failure - Thank God for RAID!

I own a 1TB external hard disk and lately I've been taking so many pictures that I realized that it would run out some day and I'd prolly need to get another hard disk to store my photos. And I'm only a 3-4months learning photographer, not to mention those professionals who have millions of photos

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Don't get me wrong but unless you're a super talent shooting 24/7 I can hardly imagine that you have nearly 1TB of keepers in 4 months. :smile:

One of the keys of becoming a good / better photographer is the ability to get rid of all the crap. First thing I do when I load new images in Lightroom is mark all technical imperfect ones like misfocused, over exposed and under exposed images and delete them.

Later I cull out images that are aesthetic failures, when I have chewed some time on them.

The only good back-up system is the one where you keep a set of your images on an off-site system like an external HD which you store in a friend's home or in a locker at work.

That is the only safeguard to fire or lightning and I know because my house was struck by lightning twice in ten years, destroying even external HD's that were not even plugged in! A raid system would have been destroyed too.

I use 2TB external hard drive but also have Google Picasa account (20GB) where I organize all my albums with keepers, mostly for sharing. If anything happens to my hard drive, I will still have all my keepers on google server. I do plan to go through all my files one day and clean up a whole bunch of them. I think dropbox is another good way to back up data.
It is much harder to back up AVCHD video cause of very large file size. I plan on purchasing a blu ray burner to back up my HD video keepers. How do you guys back up your HD video??

Don't get me wrong but unless you're a super talent shooting 24/7 I can hardly imagine that you have nearly 1TB of keepers in 4 months. :smile:

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Don't get me wrong, most of my photos aren't well shot. And the main reason I don't want to delete all these photos is cause most of my photos were outings with my good friends. And I just thought if I delete these photos, after 10 years or so I wouldnt be able to check back and see some good moments of my past.

I just upgraded my Imac internal HD from 320GB to 2TB. It failed at short notice but did give me some warning signs as to the pending failure. I was able to enable Time Machine for 2 months prior to it dying permanently. The cost was minimal and now the western digital 2TB Ext HD connected to the Imac is only used for Time Machine backup of the Imac.

Don't get me wrong, most of my photos aren't well shot. And the main reason I don't want to delete all these photos is cause most of my photos were outings with my good friends. And I just thought if I delete these photos, after 10 years or so I wouldnt be able to check back and see some good moments of my past.

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